 Hello again. I realised when I started thinking about doing a book a month that it was going to take me a very long time to get through all my favourite books. So I thought maybe I might do the occasional single book but there's also the idea of looking at themes. So it's new year. So this month's theme is forest gardening and it's... you could think of forest gardening as being something that's more to do with the summer because of course it's when you might be harvesting from the garden through the spring, the summer and the autumn but the winter is when we do planning and also when we might be planting a lot of things in the forest garden. So perhaps you've heard of forest gardens or perhaps you already have one but if you start looking at the books on forest gardening, those that have the words forest gardens in the title there's quite a lot of them and so this really is just looking at what are the different books that you might come across and why might there be the book for you. So I'm going to start with the first book on forest gardening. Now it's important to say that the forest garden is modelled originally on the tropical food forest where a lot of food is grown below the canopy of the forest because there's a lot of light in the tropics and you can grow things at ground level under trees. Now in Britain and similar latitudes northern Europe and so on it's a rather different situation it's a lot less light here so it tends to be quite dark underneath forest canopy and so really a forest garden shouldn't really be so much called a forest garden. Martin Crawford who's one of the most inspirational people doing forest gardening these days he says really he would prefer the term woodland edge gardening because it's really looking at what grows on the woodland edge or the different levels and so on. Anyway so the the first book was called Forest Gardening and so essentially that name has been kept and it was written by Robert Hart who was I was very lucky to go and stay with for a whole week in the last year of his life and I remember looking at the visitor book and seeing how many people have visited his tiny little quarter acre forest garden which always felt much bigger than a quarter acre when you were in it and how many people have been inspired and of course the evidence of that is seen in the forest gardens that you find around these days but also the number of books that we have now with the words forest gardening in the title. So Robert really was talking about his journey the creation of the forest garden but there wasn't a lot of technical detail there was some plants in here and so on but he didn't have a lot of technical detail in here to help you create your own if you like. So so that's the first one. So Patrick Whitefield who's who was a very inspirational permaculture teacher and had written a number of books very important books so he spent time with Robert and essentially wrote the technical manual that Robert never got to write so this book was quite fun trying to hold up a book and show it. You can see it's got quite a lot of there's some nice photos in here of well Robert's forest garden quite a lot of Robert's forest garden here things about the different layers of the forest garden the things that you might be planting and so on. There's also a bit at the beginning about how you might lay out the garden different patterns in the garden. You'll find the things and the kind of basics of what permaculture what forest gardens are and how they work and so on. Just never find the diagram you need. Anyway so that's the technical manual the first technical manual really on forest gardening. Very good book. Around that time also a couple called Addy and Ken Fern were experimenting with growing many different plants that might be well suited to the forest garden and they wrote this book Plants for a Future and set up a charity also with the same name and they've also created over the years many years now a large database of plants that you can access at Plants for a Future I think it's PFAF.org on the internet with over 8,000 different species now that they've documented lots of details about how to grow them cultivate them what kind of conditions they like what they produce and so on and this book really is there it's kind of the highlights or the main the main attractions if you like it's got some nice color photographs in here I remember when I got this book I was incredibly inspired to go out and get the seeds of many of these things and grow them and some more successfully than others but again really excellent book Plants for a Future and then across the pond in the States these two books came out so see now we've changed scale entirely so these two books edible forest gardens, gardens volumes one and two different thicknesses same price the reason is that this has got color in it and this is just black and white but both excellent books on different aspects so volume one is vision and theory and volume two design and practice this gives you a sense of what's going on inside the books and again very lovely books lots of information lots of research lots of case studies so this is a case study of Robert's garden winlock edge and the things that were good about it and the things that didn't work so well and that's one of the key things about this book is it's looking at what's one of the successful strategies and one of the things that are not so good what have we learned from doing these different things forest gardens are designed to be multifunctional so primarily perennial focused although they might have some readily self-seeding annuals in the system and that the outputs from the garden would include quite a lot of food but not necessarily just foods you have many plants in there to support other plants or to provide other things and one of the nice things about the parts for a future book this one here it has in the appendices lists of I can find it here we are plants for specific habitats there plant uses there we are right at the back and it's got all kinds of things in here gelatin substitutes oil egg substitutes condiments coffee substitutes that might be some people might debate whether it's a really a substitute for coffee seed paths there's fire retardants here are non-edible uses there's lots of things in heritages and beads and ink and insecticides and all kinds of things so plants for many many uses so these two books they're great they all set you back certainly outside the US quite a few pounds or euros and probably dollars do they say they don't have the price on the back in dollars oh yes they do 75 dollars still quite a lot of money but if you're thinking of doing forest gardening seriously then they're essential really because they're great books and the money you spend on the books you'll save anyway and the mistakes you don't make the trees you don't kill by putting them in the wrong place so kind of coming back and sitting somewhere in between the previous scales is Martin Crawford's first kind of proper big book he's written many what might be called kind of directories of different plants around different categories trees and shrubs and ground covers and nitrogen fixes and all kinds of things and lots of technical stuff this was his first kind of pretty book if you like and as you can see my copy is fairly well taped together from many years of abuse and it's not that old a book but compared to the price of the other books you know this this is a book that has plenty in it it's full-color it's very beautiful book has lots of technical detail in it it's basically Martin's experience from all the many 20 odd years of him doing forest gardening what he's learned the things he's grown the things that work to some degree the plants that he's grown that are in the plants for a future book that he agrees with rather than thinking they're a bit borderline whether I would eat that or not and so there's all the details of how to put it together and then long lists of species and the kind of conditions they need and what they produce and how you look after them and so on and so forth so an excellent book certainly in terms of value for money I think this is about 30 pounds which for the side of the book and what you get is really a bargain and I think if you were thinking of starting with a forest garden to do it properly that's where I would recommend starting that one and then there's a few books here that kind of sit to the side of the other books there's food from your forest garden this was Martin and a friend of mine Caroline Akin who is another permaculture teacher and Martin she they live quite close together so Martin gave her she kept giving her produce from the garden and she went about seeing what they could do with it so it's really a collection of recipes around how to use the different things that come from the forest garden because whilst forest gardens should include a lot of things we like to eat like apples and pears and soft fruits and so on there's also a lot of things that we can grow in a forest garden which are less familiar and it's good to know how to use them so this is a book of plants and recipes if you like and again really nice lovely book how they recommended food from your forest garden and this is the one that I'm obsessed by at the moment the Forest Garden greenhouse because living in cool temperate Britain and I'm very excited by what could be grown more inside a greenhouse environment in terms of things that we can't normally grow here what's on the edge of and wherever you are there's always it's likely that there are things you can't grow either because it's too hot or it's too cold and so Jerome who wrote this book the Forest Garden greenhouse lives at quite high altitude in Colorado and they grow bananas and papayas and things in the greenhouse environment because they create a very what they call a climate battery which is a way of storing the heat from the warm time of the year and during the day into the soil which involves quite a bit of construction put it all together some pictures of that going on in the book the case studies all of the different greenhouses they get they have and how they're designed to do to create different environmental conditions if you like tropical or Mediterranean whatever this is the basic idea is that a fan brings the heat from the top of the greenhouse down into a collection of pipes which are buried in the ground there we are there's quite a lot of work to do to begin with you can see quite a lot of pipes but once you've got that in place then essentially you create the conditions to grow lots of interesting things in a greenhouse situation obviously not really something that works in the little greenhouse but they say anything from 10 meters by three and a half four meters upwards and you should be good and all being well we have one of those very same a couple more books one is forest gardening in practice this is by Thomas Romiaz who again is another permaculturist in the UK network and he's gone around basically looking at existing forest gardens studying how they work and so some of them are private some of them are community what are the things that work about forest gardens so it is very difficult to show a book of this size to the camera and do the logistics of holding it and so on but so essentially it's his research journey if you like of going around all these different projects what they've learned what's good what's not so good how to do forest garden even better than we have up to now very recent book very very again very useful particularly if you're thinking about creating a forest garden what might go wrong so in what can you do well so the last book is quite thin as you can see but literally arrived yesterday and it's a little booklet on forest gardening a beginners guide by Graham Burnett now Graham is the author of a number of different small-ish booklets and also a rather chunky book called the vegan book of permaculture which is here somewhere here it is and probably best known for writing permaculture a beginner's guide which is now gone to a color version this is also a color booklet and full color throughout it's full of Graham's great lovely diagrams lovely colored diagrams I think it's quite fitting that Graham should write a beginner's guide to forest gardening because as you can see none of these are beginner's guides they're all rather big books it's very tempting to write a lot about forest gardening and but very fitting because often if you go on to the internet and you type in forest gardening you'll get pictures and you'll often see this diagram essentially which Graham drew many years ago in for that particular beginners guide so it's nice to see him actually pre-creating beginner's guide to forest gardening and yes it's quite small it's got 20 about 30 pages but he does he even makes really good use of the space so he starts with a very kind of succinct description of what forest gardening is and how it's important for the environment and so on so you have lost a page already different functions education health and well-being and so on a little bit of a history is picture of Robert Hart there and then you start getting into the realm of how do I go about doing it for myself so what do you want I mean a forest garden is a structure really and what you put into that structure is really down to what your needs are and so he just kind of asked the key questions of what do you want what you got what your current situation what scale can you work at because we can even create a forest garden in a very small garden for a small space with just you know a single tree and collection of things around and then he yeah provides a nice little pattern about how you might create it over time and just got things about resources and stock design in the ground layer a little mapping plan there that's a so on so forth and about these and then he gets into some recommended plants and particularly my one of my favorite plants is Japanese wineberry fantastic fruit it grows very well in the forest garden and so it's quite succinct but I think a really excellent book booklet to buy for someone as a gift or just as a starter it's really about inspiring giving kind of the essence of what forest gardening is about and where to start what are the key things to know about so my table is done there's a lot of books there hopefully there's one there that is perfect for you or for you to give to somebody as a gift and I wish you a lot of fun dreaming up what you're going to plant